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Cinderella

is a 1950 American animated musical fantasy film produced by Walt Disney and released by RKO Radio Pictures a. Based on the fairy tale Cendrillon by Charles Perrault, it is twelfth in the Walt Disney Animated Classics series, and was released on February 15, 1950. Directing credits go to Clyde Geronimi, Hamilton Luske and Wilfred Jackson. Songs were written by Mack David, Jerry Livingston, and Al Hoffman. Songs in the film include “Cinderella”, “A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes”, “Sing Sweet Nightingale”, “The Work Song”, “Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo”, and “So This is Love”. It features the voices of Ilene Woods, Eleanor Audley, Verna Felton, Rhoda Williams, James MacDonald, Luis van Rooten, Don Barclay, Mike Douglas, and Lucille Bliss.

At the time, Walt Disney Productions had suffered from losing connections to the European film markets due to the outbreak of World War II, enduring some box office disasters like Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Bambi, all of which would later become more successful with several re-releases in theaters and on home video. At the time, however, the studio was over $4 million in debt and was on the verge of bankruptcy. Walt Disney and his animators turned back to feature film production in 1948 after producing a string of package films with the idea of adapting Charles Perrault’s Cendrillon into a motion picture. It is the first Disney film in which all of Disney’s Nine Old Men worked together as directing animators. After two years in production Cinderella was finally released on February 15, 1950. It became the greatest critical and commercial hit for the studio since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and helped reverse the studio’s fortunes. It is considered one of the best American animated films ever made, as selected by the American Film Institute. It received three Academy Award nominations, including Best Music, Original Song for “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo”. Decades later, it was followed by two direct-to-video sequels—Cinderella II: Dreams Come True and Cinderella III: A Twist in Time—and a 2015 live-action adaptation.